writing prompt response

Visualize an edge. It can be an edge of something tangible or of experience. In as much detail as you can, feel the physical setting -- colors, temperatures (it's cold way down there Laura Nyro sings), textures, sounds -- and write what happens.

When I was a kid, younger than 10, I had a recurring dream about a narrow suspension bridge. I had to walk it to the other end, where the light was. On either side of the two-foot wide bridge was an abyss (How I knew the word abyss at the ripe old age of eight, I don't know, but I also knew the word infinity in kindergarten. "There must be an infinite number of cookies in that box," I commented during a lesson on estimates.). I knew I couldn't fall and I couldn't jump into the place of nothing, giving up. The abyss echoed with my cries, sometimes glowed red in the dark, sometimes spun a chilly whirlpool of nothingness. As unappealing as walking this bridge path was, the abyss was less appealing.

At the time, I wasn't so wide as I am now, my feet not so long, I was a delicate child, a long drink of water, my Aunt called me. I played soccer and kick ball, was the square dance expert in 4th grade. I wore shorts under my pleated, seersucker dresses and swung round and round on the parallel bar, my long stringy hair sweeping the dusty ground at every rotation. I was absolutely capable of traversing this precipice of my dream, yet I was still afraid. The bridge was invisible, surrounded by fog or dry ice, an eerie werewolf movie setting.

When my older brothers were charged with babysitting my sister and me, they forced us to watch Dark Shadows and any werewolf or vampire thriller that filled the black and white television screen of my childhood. We lived in the Pennsylvania woods, in a four-story country home with no curtains on the windows. We didn't need curtains for privacy. We had trees. My brothers would begin the evening following our TV dinners with a news story. "Did you hear about the crazy guy who escaped from the Bedlam House?" Then, as we are watching horror flicks on the boob tube, one brother disappears with the excuse of homework.

Suddenly, a knock on the door. Parents aren't due home until after bedtime. We don't lock our doors in the country. Nobody visits us at night. Stomach tightens. Eyes dart at every foreign sound.

A tree branch scratches against the night-blackened window, or is it a branch? Goosebumps.

I don't know how to swear yet and I'm not allowed to say, "Oh my God." But a hand appears, pressed against the winter window pane.

That face.

I scream.

My brother laughs. That face, my other brother leering through the window as dry-ice covers the gravesites on the television and scary music from some unremembered composer imprints my fear of fog.

I cannot walk this foggy precipice. I cannot see the pathway. I cannot see at all, but I have other senses, and I don’t know the name for it then, but I am a kinesthetic learner. I feel my way through life. So that’s what I do in my dream. Each step an experiment in survival, I inch my way along. In the dream, I never fall and I never reach the end. Black and white as all dreams, black and white as the old RCA television, I was called to live in gray and still do. There are no absolutes, only color and courage over fear, and sweet tension of cello strings in horror movies anticipating a pinpoint of light at the very end. There is only infinity and the abyss. Take your pick.